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Updated: June 23, 2025
But my gallery is in no danger of being copied at present. Three years since, I met an artist in the stony bed of a brook, between a line of 300 graven, lichened godlings and a flaming bank of azaleas, swearing horribly. He had been trying to paint one of my pictures nothing more than a big water-worn rock tufted with flowers and a snow-capped hill for background.
Melancholy reminders of this splendor exist even now in the shape of a crumbled ruin here and there, a lichened pillar, an occasional porcelain urn in its place atop a vine-grown bit of wall.
For the earth was strown with the winter-spread and coil of last year's foliage, the lichened claws of chalky twigs, and the numberless decay which gives a light in its decaying. I, for my part, hastened shyly, ready to draw back and run from hare, or rabbit, or small field-mouse.
We crossed the Po, and kept steadily on, taking fresh horses when we could, until towards sunset a turn in the road brought Pagliano into our view grey and lichened on the crest of its smooth emerald hill. The dusk was falling and lights began to gleam from some of the castle windows when we brought up in the shadow of the gateway.
I found I was an hour too early; so I went and talked to Chloe a little, scattered crumbs for the first-come birds and corn for the chickens, and looked down the deep, deep well, with its curb lichened over, into the dark pupil of water, whose iris is never disturbed, unless by the bucket that hung in such gibbety repose on the lofty extreme of the great sweep, that creaked dismally, uttering a pitiful cry of complaint.
The Fire-Bird brought with him his nest of cassia and sprigs of incense, and this he put down upon the lichened rocks, and he sat in it while he talked with Manuel.
On strode my Beltane by rippling brook and sleepy pool, with step swift and light and eyes wide and shining, threading an unerring course as only a forester might; now crossing some broad and sunny glade where dawn yet lingered in rosy mist, anon plunging into the green twilight of dell and dingle, through tangled brush and scented bracken gemmed yet with dewy fire, by marsh and swamp and lichened rock, until he came out upon the forest road, that great road laid by the iron men of Rome, but now little better than a grassy track, yet here and there, with mossy stone set up to the glory of proud emperor and hardy centurion long since dust and ashes; a rutted track, indeed, but leading ever on, 'neath mighty trees, over hill and dale towards the blue mystery beyond.
An emanation, a particular spirit, belonged not to the moving leaves or water only, but to the distant peak arising suddenly, by some change of perspective, above the nearer horizon of the hills, to the passing space of light across the plain, to the lichened Druidic stone even, for a certain weird fellowship in it with the moods of men.
There was no call to be fretful and vehement. They would work together in patience and in confidence. God's sun was everywhere. It needed only that dark places should be opened up and it would enter. Sometimes, seated on a lichened log, or on the short grass of some sloping hillside, looking down upon some quiet valley, they would find they had been holding hands while talking.
She thought of the English landscapes, of the woods and uplands round her Cumberland home; of the old church, the embowered cottages, the lichened farms; the generations of lives that have died into the soil, like the summer leaves of the trees; of the ghosts to be felt in the air ghosts of squire and labourer and farmer, alive still in men and women of the present, as they too will live in the unborn.
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